A machine-to-machine communication (machine-to-machine; M2M) technology is an integrated communication and network technology, which is a technology for connecting machine devices spreading all over daily lives of people into a network, so that these devices become more “intelligent”. The M2M technology has features such as no wiring and wide coverage. The M2M technology relates to a large number of terminals, puts forward high requirements on the management capability of the network side, and increases the transmission load between the network and the terminals. Therefore, in order to be capable of optimizing the management capability of the network side, and optimizing signaling or data transmission between the network and the terminals, the terminals in M2M perform grouping according to different dimensions, for example, different area information, different applications, or different machine type communications (Machine Type Communications; MTC) owners. For example, multiple MTC devices on an automobile may be classified as a group of terminal devices in the M2M generally, and these terminal devices usually jointly move.
When a group of devices in a same location in the existing M2M perform location update, it is required that each device in the group initiates a location update request to the network separately, and the network performs location update on each device separately. At the same time, if one device in the group sends an alarm request to the network, or the network monitors that an anomaly occurs in one device in the group, the network only processes the device, and does not perform corresponding processing on one or more other devices in the group. In the prior art, network resources are wasted, much signaling is transmitted between the network and the device, and the efficiency of the network control over the group of devices is low.